The Forever War

Book four of The New York Times ten best of 2008 is The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins, a war correspondent for that newspaper (and before that the L.A. Times) about his experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I've read a lot of books lately about the U.S. military misadventures in Iraq, so I wasn't exactly keen on opening this one. Filkins opens with a few chapters on being in Afghanistan in 1998, and memorably invokes how far away it is from American life by detailing a public amputation and execution in a soccer stadium. But it wasn't until mid-way through the book that he metaphorically grabbed hold of me and made me pay attention.

One of the chapters was a surreal one about suicide bombers that was some of the best writing in the book. Filkins sees the humor in the situation, somehow. He writes about how there are Web sites devoted to instructing would-be martyrs about how to do it: "Take a bus to the Iraqi border, 'wear jeans and eat donuts and use a Walkman which has a tape of any singer. Do this for Allah's sake; war is tricks.' Once you are across, the manual said, do anything your bosses tell you. 'Never say that you do not do suicide work.'" Filkins goes on to mention that very often the heads of suicide bombers remain intact: "The craziest thing about the suicide bombers were the heads--how the head of the bomber often remained intact after the explosion. It was the result of some weird law that only a physicist could explain: the force of the blast would detach the bomber's head and throw it up and away, too fast for the blast to destroy it. So there it would be, the head, sitting on a pile of bricks or underneath a telephone pole."

Filkins ends the chapter by visiting an Iraqi (they are nothing if not hospitable to a fault) who shows Filkins a video of an American being beheaded, while his host was beside himself with laughter, rocking back and forth, running his finger across his throat.

The next chapter Filkins is embedded with a company of Marines during their invasion of Fallujah. He supplies many stories of Marines and where they're from, and it all ends heartbreakingly when Filkins and his photographer want to climb a tower to get a good picture. A couple of Marines escort them, and one of them ends up getting killed. Filkins lives with this every day. His prose in this chapter is crisp and to the point, which seems to amplify the horror: "Jake played mostly Johnny Cash, 'Ring of Fire' his favorite. Jake even sort of looked like Johnny Cash, big, square jaw. Which was blown off by the grenade."

After reading this book you learn several things, and one of them may be that Filkins is either very brave or very crazy. He spent nine years in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and put himself in dangerous situations often, only to be saved by an interpreter or driver. The threat of kidnapping or murder for Westerners was palpable, and Filkins describes several narrow escapes, such as when he interviews a local leader who is having a discussion in Arabic with the interpreter. Filkins later learns that the man wanted to kidnap him and split the ransom with the interpreter. Or the time he has to outrace a BMW full of insurgents, or the time he is arrested and deported by the Taliban. During his long stint in Baghdad he continues to jog every morning, despite the danger and the 120 degree heat.

Filkins also happens to be in New York immediately following 9/11, and writes about a hallucinatory night spent sleeping in a men's clothing store near Ground Zero.

This book is as much as about Filkins, a man who has his humanity chipped away slowly but surely, as it is about American soldiers in Iraq. He is clearly enamored with much of what the Iraqi people offer, though he also recognizes their brutality: "Electric drills where a Shiite obsession. When you found a guy with drill marks in his legs, he was almost certainly a Sunni, and he was almost certainly killed by a Shiite. The Sunnis preferred to behead, or to kill themselves while killing others. By and large, the Shiites didn't behead, didn't blow themselves up. The derangements were mutually exclusive."

At the end of the book, Filkins is back in the States and you almost exhale in relief, as I'm sure his family did. But he is forever changed: "My friend George, an American reporter I'd gotten to know in Iraq, told me he couldn't have a conversation with anyone who hadn't been there. I told him I couldn't have a conversation with anyone who hadn't been there about anything at all."